‘Science and Nature’

Usually, storms like tornadoes and hurricanes twirl in circles. But this storm on Saturn that has probably been raging for centuries is different. Click “Read More” to find out why and do the stormy math!

We all know that soda is loaded with sugar, rots people’s teeth and makes people fat if they drink too much. So it’s not surprising what’s left when one guy boils a bottle of soda. Click “Read More” to see how the math in all this boils out!

Palm trees are those tall, skinny plants with the spiky green pom-pom tops, often swaying in the breeze near some beautiful blue ocean. As cute and perky as these trees look, palm leaves can grow more than 75 feet long and over 10 feet wide! Click “Read More” to see how these tall giants stack up, and do the math.

The bat is a strange, spooky animal. It looks like a mouse with spiky wings, and makes squeaky sounds to find the food it’s hunting down to eat. The biggest, most alarming crowd of these might be the Congress Avenue Bridge bats in Austin, Texas, with more than 1 1/2 million bats. Click “Read More” to find out what’s so good about these animals – and do the batty math!

The green anaconda is by far the biggest snake in the world. It’s the heaviest, the thickest, and also the second longest, outdone only by the python. Click “Read More” to do the slimey math on this snake!

Flying people to Mars won’t be easy. They’ll have to fly on a 3-year, 60-million mile trip to the right place, and then land on the ground safely. With the air so thin on Mars, you can’t land a spacecraft like you would an airplane. So NASA’s improvising. Click “Read More” to find out how, and do the math!

We know birds migrate, meaning they travel to cool places during the summer, then back to warmer places to spend the winter. What’s incredible is how fast that flying can add up for even the tiniest bird. Click “Read More” to do the math on how one bird has really racked up the frequent flyer miles!

On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell finally got his invention working: the telephone. It worked nothing like our phones today: the very first phones were sold in pairs, where each phone could call only that one other phone (you had to pick that other person carefully). Then came the “switchboard,” which let you call any other phone, but the “operator,” a phone company person in the middle of town, had to plug in wires to connect your call for you. Now we can call anyone anywhere on our own within seconds, and through the air. But that first phone, that first time talking to someone through a wire, must have looked like magic.

When it snows outside and you get that really wet, sticky kind of snow, it’s easy to pack it with your hands into a solid white ball that just begs to be thrown. Sure, you can roll it along the ground to make it bigger, and pile up a few to make a snowman…but it might be even more fun just to chuck it at someone. We’re not exactly sure who invented the snowball fight, but we do know that in 1863, during the American Civil War, when a few soldiers started chucking friendly snowballs at each other, it turned into a giant fight involving 9,000 soldiers. If serious grownups can get sucked in like that, it’s clear the snowball fight is here to stay.

The last week of January often marks the coldest week of the year, at least for the northern half of our planet. We’ve been tilted away from the sun for weeks, we’ve had short days of sunlight, and in some places cloudy gray skies make matters worse. So it’s no surprise that many states have had their coldest temperature ever in late January or early February. When you see some of the records set over the decades, you might find that a bowl of ice cream at 3 degrees F could warm you up.